There are certain works of literature that are finally stymied by the bold effort of the writer to pursue a personal vision beyond the limits of precedent and genre. Stendhal’s Charterhouse is a memorable case in point; another, still closer to Shira in its actual incompletion, is Kafka’s The Castle. Confronted with this order of originality, most readers, I think, will be content with the splendid torso, however much they may regret the absence of the fully sculpted figure. In Shira the hero’s final way to the place of poetry and truth, where death hones desire, is indicated rather than fictionally imagined. But Herbst’s descent into an underworld of eros and art, enacted against the background of Jerusalem life in the gathering shadows of a historical cataclysm of inconceivable proportions, is so brilliantly rendered that Shira, even without an ending, deserves a place among the major modern novels.
Robert Alter is Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written extensively on modern Hebrew literature and on the Bible as well as on the European and American novel.
* “A Novel of the Post-Tragic World,” in my book Defenses of the Imagination: Jewish Writers and Modern Historical Crisis (Philadelphia, 1977).
Agnon’s Shira: A Translator’s Afterthoughts Zeva Shapiro
S. Y. Agnon’s romantic novel, Shira, is an ode to Jerusalem, understated in its tone, complex in its structure, overwhelming in its lyric sweep. When the initial chapters appeared, intermittently in the literary journals of the early 1940s and ‘50s, readers reveled in the fun of identifying the prominent public figures who served as models for many of Agnon’s thinly disguised characters. In the 1970s when the novel was published, posthumously, critics were challenged by the task of decoding the message and dealing with the ambiguous conclusion of the Nobel laureate’s final work.
The novel unfolds on several levels through characters whose actions are ordinary, though weighted with an awareness of motives and alternatives. The actions and thought processes of the central figures — Manfred Herbst, a professor of Byzantine history who is on the brink of middle age; his wife Henrietta, who is more interested in her family, household, social conscience, then in meeting her husband’s needs; Shira, the arrogant nurse with whom Herbst has an affair and, to his dismay, becomes passionately entangled — have an insistently comic dimension that moves Agnon’s painstakingly detailed accounts of an action or thought process beyond the obsessive to the realm of the absurd.
In Shira Agnon writes, at last, about his own time and place: Palestine in the period of the British Mandate, with the Holocaust casting its shadow on the mechanics of life, personal modes, political options. Agnon’s prose is relatively free of nostalgia and pietism, providing wry descriptions of academia, the religious community, political responses ranging from the innocent to the militant, describing a context that one recognizes all too well to this day. Though the narrative line of the novel is rather loose, Agnon’s distinctive prose embodies a very special realm where thought and feeling meet, a powerful and fascinating integral logic that engages the reader and evokes endlessly new meanings from what might otherwise be considered the trivia of everyday life and consciousness.
When I began to discover intimations of Agnon in the events of my own daily life, I realized that he had entered my world just as I had entered his. I began to flow with the text, and Shira (the women at the romantic center of this novel, whose name means poetry/song in Hebrew) was transformed from a fiercely pragmatic figure to a sensual evocation of King Solomon’s beloved. Herbst’s often frantic rambles through modern Jerusalem were enriched by the resonance of familiar verses: “Upon my couch at night I sought the one I love — I must rise and roam the town, in the streets and squares I must seek the one I love.” There are more pointed references to the Song of Songs (Shir HaShirim in Hebrew) throughout the novel — so that for me King Solomon’s passion inhabits its core. In a crucial scene, toward the end of the novel, Herbst regards a painting of a leper “with panic in his eyes and desire in his heart,” a phrase that echoes Herbst’s tortured relation to Shira and will, undoubtedly resonate even for the common reader who will not make the leap to the verse in Chronicles I, wherein David informs the people that the Lord has chosen Solomon to build the Temple, rejecting David because of the bloody consequences of his affair with Bathsheba.
Books I and II of Shira both end with dreams. In a dramatic segment that has the intensity of a gripping nightmare (included as “Final Chapter” at the end of the English-language edition), Herbst finds Shira in a leper colony and decides to stay with her there. Emuna Yaron, Agnon’s daughter and dedicated editor, whose notes are a primary source in our attempt to reconstruct Agnon’s design for this book, provides the following information: “This chapter, which belongs after Book III, was meant to be the conclusion of the book, but Agnon removed it and began writing Book IV.” In fact, this segment, with its bizarre dream-like syntax, seems to fit between Chapters 18 and 19, near the end of Book III, where it is consistent with the lurid surreal mode of the ongoing text. Chapter 19 begins with a reference to a dream, somewhat distinct from the visions that plagued Herbst in the preceding chapter. And Agnon himself almost seems to be addressing problems of chronology arising from this placement (the baby, to whom Shira refers in these pages is not actually born until the final chapter of Book III, some 25 pages later), when he remarks: “I will relay something that becomes relevant later on. Why advance the sequence now? Because what follows cannot be interrupted.”